A Time of Unimaginable Sorrow is Upon Us

It was a nice cool sunny morning with some blue birds soaking up the sun, all in a row on the high wire. It took some time to figure out what happened. There were a few low rumbles, they seemed to be coming from north of here. We live on a farm out in the wooded hills of southern Missouri, and north would be up towards St Louis. Soon as the booming sounds started the power went off. At first, I didn’t pay much attention, but with all the military stirrings going on in the world these days, you just don’t know what to expect.

I went inside the house, but with the power off there’s no internet, so no way to find out what’s going on. At least until the power comes back on, or until I get the generator started up. More distant thunderous booms that echo now less like thunder and more like tremendous explosions – and I’m starting to get worried. My kids are at work and the grandkids are in school. I swear I‘m seeing sparks and smoke coming from under the hood of my car, but it’s not running. Now the power line where those bluebirds were singing looks like it’s getting really hot and smoke is coming from the bucket transformer on the poles. Wow! The transformer just blew up sending a shower of sparks and molten metal flying all around the pole! I can hear blasts all over the countryside from more pole transformers exploding. All the fences are sparking and smoking. The woods around the power lines and transformers are starting to go up in extremely violent flames. And the cars are now on fire – all of them! Even the old broken-down ones out in people’s pastures. Our emergency generators are smoking – I’ve got to get them away from the houses before they burn up.

‘Report by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) says there’s an estimated 13,865 nuclear weapons in the hands of nine states’, Anna Ahronheim, June 17, 2019, jpost.com

I’m going to paste most of the author’s coverage of the report given that the technical information about the different kinds of fissile material used, the delivery systems, the numbers of nukes, etc. can be good to know.  What doesn’t seem to be covered, and may not be knowable, is the yield of any of these nukes: blast radius, ‘equaling X tons of TNT’, and so on. My ignorance on the subject is almost total.

Scott Ritter has a great piece over at Truthdig about Putin's speech, especially the part about the Russian government's repeated efforts to engage the United States in negotiations over nuclear weapons agreements since we withdrew from the ABM Treaty. Ritter likens the efforts to Verizon's commercials in which a caller asks repeatedly, "Can you hear me now?"

In 2006 I posted this diary at Dkos about Rumsfeld and George W. Bush enabling the North Korean nuclear weapons project. The last point in the FORTUNE article still concerns me. Are we subsidizing, never mind approving, private companies efforts to provide us with enemies?

...The Bush administration... authorized $3.5 million to keep the project going

This is important information for people to understand.

Population of Israel - 8.3 million
Population of Iran - 81 million

Land area of Israel - 8 thousand square miles
Land area of Iran - 636 thousand square miles

Both are self governing independent nations recognized by the United Nations.

Number of Nuclear weapons possessed by Israel - estimated at between 75 and 400

North Korea probably acquired the rocket engines for the two intercontinental ballistic missiles it tested in July from Ukrainian or Russian sources within the past two years, a study has claimed.

As we celebrated this July the severing of ties to the royal house of Great Britain in 1776, the truth is that we have come full circle and have since 1945 been living under a far more dangerous and absolute system than anything King George III could have contemplated in his wildest dreams, what author Elaine Scarry calls, “the Thermonuclear Monarchy.”